Surface RUST: Game Progression, Monument Changes, New Convars
The majority of changes in RUST’s October 2025 patch center on setup for the massive Naval Update, addressing concerns that progression occurs too quickly and players reach endgame content in a few hours. Additionally, there are a few backend admin changes that could shake things up. There doesn’t appear to be any DLC-specific additions being made in October.
This may not be a comprehensive representation of changes made days or hours before the wipe on October 2nd, as tweaks are often made right up until wipe day. We are knowingly excluding the Naval Update information until it’s closer to launch.
Workbench 2 & 3 Gating
The community has long been critical of how fast a game like RUST progresses, with players often going from the spawn beach to monolithic bases and Assault Rifles in just a few hours. This was further exacerbated when the tech tree change was implemented, allowing players to farm Scrap and incur a slight penalty to learn endgame items, rather than being forced into monuments or PvP to get ahead.
As a resounding gate-metric to this, the tech tree itself will now be a bit more difficult to acquire, with the Workbench Level 2 and Workbench Level 3 having either Basic Blueprint Fragments (tier 2) or Advanced Blueprint Fragments (tier 3) added to their crafting cost.
It’s not all bad, as the Scrap portion of their crafting cost has been reduced to 250 for the Workbench Level 2, and 500 for the Workbench Level 3.
Basic Blueprint Fragments
With 5 of these being used in the creation of the Workbench Level 2, Basic Blueprint Fragments are a non-craftable world spawn item, found in Green and Blue Keycard puzzle rooms, on the desk beside the Blue or Red Keycard. Pickups from Green Keycard swipe rooms yield 1 fragment, with 2 being received from Blue Keycard swipe rooms.
There was a commit indicating that they would also be a 100% drop from Supply Drops, but this isn’t currently on Staging Branch. 20 Basic Blueprint Fragments may be upgraded to create a single Advanced Blueprint Fragment. They may also be acquired through recycling a Workbench Level 2. You currently cannot recycle Advanced Fragments for Basic, despite the upgrade implication that would suggest you could.
TL:DR; If the player has all keycards, you may receive the following from each monument:
Airfield – 2
Arctic Research Base – 2
Dome – 1
Ferry Terminal – 1
Harbor (Small & Large) – 1
Missile Silo – 2
Power Plant – 3
Rad Town – 1
Satellite Dish – 1
Sewer Branch – 1
Train Yard – 3
Water Treatment Plant – 2
Advanced Blueprint Fragments
With 5 of these being used in the creation of the Workbench Level 3, Advanced Blueprint Fragments are a non-craftable world spawn item, found in Elite and Hackable Locked crates. 20 Basic Blueprint Fragments may be upgraded to create a single Advanced Blueprint Fragment. They may be directly acquired from the top of the Launch Site Red Keycard puzzle and the end of the Military Tunnel Red Keycard puzzle loot room.
TL:DR Version, If the player has all keycards, you may receive the following from each monument:
Launch Site – 2
Military Tunnels – 2
Monument Changes
As these are many and broad, we will instead take a more direct per-monument approach, highlighting what is being changed at each location.
Loot Distribution & Location Relevance
Many world monuments, such as Airfield, Water Treatment, and a few others, have had their static loot locations changed a bit, as well as the frequency at which they respawn. Crates that once spawned at the default location 1 could now be in several other spots within the monument.
In addition, monuments such as Oxum’s Gas Station or Mining Outpost now have their loot spawning crates increased in quality when located in what would be considered a harder Tier 1 area instead of a Tier 0 spawn area. This means that instead of a bunch of small brown crates spawning, the larger brown or even green military crates may spawn at a higher rate instead.
Diesel Fuel Acquisition
Diesel Gatekeeping was also implemented at several monuments. The Water Treatment Plant, Power Plant, and Airfield lost their open-world spawn locations, instead having their Diesel Barrels spawn behind their Blue or Green Keycard swipe puzzles. Other monuments like Junkyard, Rad Town, and Dome were left alone in this pass, but this is probably an indication that RUST is moving in that direction.
Green Card Room Puzzle Additions
Several lower-tier monuments have had new Green Card room puzzles added to their existing infrastructure, found below with pictures.
Dome
Ferry Terminal
Rad Town
Hackable Loot Crate Update
The loot table of the Hackable crate has been switched up considerably, resembling a weak Bradley crate more than its previous table. Things like quarter stacks of assorted 5.56 Ammo and other Workbench 3 items are more prevalent.
Charity Plushies
This year’s charity entries are for Ronald McDonald House and Cancer Research UK. Item descriptions indicate that they will be available for purchase directly on the RUST store in October, not to be confused with the upcoming Youtooz Plushies.
Bicycle Bunnyhopping
Standard single-person peddlebikes now have a bunnyhop option, usable every 3 seconds while mounted by pressing the Right Mouse button by default.
The current rules are as follows:
Can only bunnyhop:
- Once every 3 seconds
- When grounded
- When not waterlogged
- When there is at least 10% sprint percentage remaining
Bunnyhop now:
- Uses correct physics calls to make a nice jump
- Uses a relative force to account for slopes
- Jumps higher at faster speeds
- Jumps get scaled by the sprint percentage remaining
- Consumes 10% sprint percentage
Hardcore Mode Turned Convar
Awesome features of Hardcore Mode have been turned into convars that admins may incorporate into their server for added difficulty without going the full distance. These include:
- mapenabled
- hideplayeronmap
- hideplayermapdirection
- fogofwar
- fogofwarrevealsize
- compassenabled
Chinook Variance
For years, the Chinook has been relatively static in its behavior, and sometimes crate drops feel rather stagnant, even determining where a person builds. Not sure if this is exactly what is being fixed, but we had the following commit that seems to allude to addressing it:
“Fix CH47 patrol point selection to use a more fair random monument choice Previously, GetRandomPatrolPoint() picked the first valid monument after a random start index. This biased results when only a few monuments were valid. Now we collect all valid monuments and select one uniformly at random, ensuring a more even distribution.”
Customizable Crosshairs
Not only are we getting awesome crosshair optimization within our Options menu, but we are also getting the ability to link our setting loadout to others via code.
Built-in Admin Logging, Fillmounts Command and Marker Teleport
Worth noting, though we don’t have much on this yet, there are commits indicating that a built-in admin log could be found in your server files shortly. This is intended to log every administrative action, regardless of how mundane or repetitive. More on this later.
There is also a new convar called debug.fillmounts that will put a naked bot in all nearby seats around the admin, such as vehicles or chairs.
Finally, admin convar enable_marker_teleport – If set to true, right-clicking on the map will teleport you to that location instead of placing a marker. Yes, it’s awesome.
Chainsaw Combat
Visual updates are being worked on for player-on-player or NPC combat. At first glance, it appears to be much more violent and effective. Use against trees remains pretty glitchy at the moment.
Drone Functions
For this one, we decided to incorporate a video clip to illustrate better where work is at. You can add items to a drone and then deploy them with a Left-Click once directly above the target you want to deliver to.
Miscellaneous Additions and Fixes
- Brown Bear meat harvested with a maximum rendering tool will now give 20 instead of 19.
- A fix was pushed to correct Jungle Animals not counting towards the Wildlife Culling quest, though most missions on staging are currently broken.
- Another patch was pushed to fix how the decay UI scale works with Tool Cupboards, cross your fingers.
- Volcano assets are being added to the game, but their current purpose is not stated.
- Work on Livestock Animals is ongoing, with new commits following up on former claims that Cows were coming.
- SAM Site reloads are now more seamless, and the hiccup after an MLRS strike should be eliminated.
- Cargoship will no longer circumnavigate the Oil Rig monuments, instead mainly staying along the coast. This is still buggy, especially for those living on icebergs.
- Work continues on Turret Interference in an attempt to prevent raiders from rendering defenders’ base defenses redundant.
- Wooden Barricade Covers are once again receiving a nerf, dropping from a max stack size of 5 to 3, and health down to 80.
Gear, Weapons & Loadout Updates
New items
- Cancer Research UK Plushie – “A soft and squishy plush that provides comfort in your base. First sold on the Rust store in October 2025 to support Cancer Research UK, each purchase helped fund real-world cancer research. www.cancerresearchuk.org” Standard 70% deployable comfort item. Costs 50 cloth to create.
- Ronald McDonald House Plushie – “A soft and squishy plush that provides comfort in your base. First sold on the Rust store in October 2025 to support Ronald McDonald House Charities, helping ease the burden on families by providing free ‘home away from home’ accommodation near hospitals. www.rmhc.org.uk” Standard 70% deployable comfort item. Costs 50 cloth to create.
- Advanced Blueprint Fragment – “Precision schematics with complex information, multiple fragments necessary for crafting a Tier 3 Workbench.” Read above in this article for full details on purpose and acquisition under Workbench 2&3 Gating.
- Basic Blueprint Fragment – “Damaged diagrams containing partial information to construct a Workbench Level 2 for advanced crafting. Several fragments are needed.” Read above in this article for full details on purpose and acquisition under Workbench Level 2 & 3 Gating.
- Small Spike Trap – “A small improvised trap that injures and slows anyone who steps on it.” Currently, a default blueprint, costing only 80 wood to craft, with no workbench requirement. Deals roughly 12 damage to a fully naked player that makes a running pass across one. They may be placed much closer together than other such traps, making them small but effective in greater numbers.
What’s Next?
Looking ahead to November, Facepunch has several interesting developments on the horizon, including the highly anticipated Naval Update. Halloween will be kicking off mid-wipe in October, with a few wallpapers planned at the moment and the RUST Halloween 2025 Skin Contest underway.
Check out November’s issue of Surface RUST for information on floating cities, boat building, ghost ships, and so much more.
As with all articles we cover, these subjects are highly subject to change at the whim of the game developer, and we will endeavor to keep the information as current as possible.
